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📚 Hey, let’s talk about…wait…what was I talking about again?

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Our attention spans and how modern society is pouring ACID on our ability to focus on anything important for longer than it takes to turn off YouTube “auto-play.”

Today’s book (it’s still Wednesday for me, but it’s probably Thursday for you) is called Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, and it’s one of the very best books I read in 2022.

It’s still relevant, too - maybe even MORE relevant as the “attention economy” ramps up speed and the war for your focus rages on.

I’m not exactly innocent in all this, either.

My day job is to command the attention of readers on social media and direct them to great books that I think they’d like.

I want your eyeballs too.

Possibly Related: Subscribe to My YouTube Channel 🙂 

The attention economy isn’t going anywhere (and for the right person, becoming a creator can be an incredibly lucrative and fulfilling career move, as it has been for me), and I don’t think it’s that nobody ANYWHERE is capable of focusing on anything any more.

There are three-hour podcasts that fly by like minutes, and enough people watch those in their entirety, so maybe it’s that people have a lower tolerance for boring content?

But Johann Hari makes some extremely compelling arguments in this book, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I loved it so much that I wrote a complete breakdown of the book that you can sample right here in this email.

So let’s dive right in and see how the modern world is conspiring to steal your focus and shift your very identity…

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This Book is For:

*Individuals who feel as though they're experiencing a reduction in their ability to focus on meaningful or cognitively demanding tasks, and who want to improve their ability to block out distractions, design their environment for increased focus, and get their brains back.

*Educators and parents, especially of young children, who are witnessing this same reduction in the ability to focus in their students' lives, and who want to develop an understanding of how exactly they can help reverse this trend.

*Anyone who is concerned about the influence of reduced attention spans on our ability to come together and take effective, collective action toward solving some of the world's biggest and most important problems.

Summary:

This important book demands the kind of attention and deep, nuanced thought that we as individuals and as a society are becoming less able to devote to anything.

In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari investigates 12 distinct causes of our dwindling attention spans - several of them systematic causes - and offers a degree of hope, even though none of us are able to win the battle for our attention alone.

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the entire book is that your increasing inability to focus is not completely your fault, and believing that it is a personal failing of yours is simply unhelpful in the very worst way.

The fact is that you and I are living within a society that is systematically siphoning off your attention, and as valuable as self-discipline is, it's not going to be enough to solve what Hari calls "the attention crisis."

And it really is a crisis. I mean, you've got the average American worker being distracted roughly once every three minutes, and even the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes a day. A day!

As discussed in the Key Ideas section below, the average American in 2017 spent just 17 minutes a day reading, compared to 5.4 hours on their phone. And I'm sure that not many of them were reading books on their phone, either!

The reality is that today, around one in five car accidents is due to a distracted driver, and untold millions of people struggle every day with the simple act of putting down their phones.

But it's not their fault, says Hari, because every time you try to put down your phone, there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.

What kind of personal will or self-discipline can stand alone against that?

So, it's obvious that our ability to pay attention is collapsing, but Johann Hari was determined to find out why this is happening.

In the process of attempting to reclaim his own mind and his own ability to focus, he ended up interviewing a multitude of experts - computer scientists, social scientists, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, technologists, etc. - and the result is this impeccably researched and insightful book.

The attention crisis is partly a personal problem, but like all the most important things in life, it extends much further than just ourselves:

The constant assault on our attention spans by the 12 forces that Hari identifies (Key Idea #3) is one of our most pressing problems because the inability to pay attention and come together to work for common goals impedes our ability to solve our other problems as well:

I highly recommend reading the entire book instead of "just" this breakdown - which is usually the case for books I feature on the Stairway to Wisdom. I choose them because they are excellent, important, and worth reading all the way through.

Stolen Focus is packed with big ideas and alarming facts, but it's also structured in a way that is exciting and compulsively readable. The 12 causes Hari talks about could fill dozens of books each, but he makes his case in a compelling way that's also easy to read.

He starts off detailing his own inability to focus, and the struggles of people he knows personally, finally ending up living alone and screen-free in Provincetown for three months while he tries to make sense of the crisis and its causes.

His time there in relative seclusion enabled him to gain a clearer sense of his own self, but also to read books again, think deeply and creatively, sleep better, and ultimately put together this phenomenally valuable book.

Now, obviously, there's an element of "must be nice" about this whole thing, and he recognizes that. Hari doesn't tell us that the solution to our problems is just to go off the grid, move to the woods, and live freely ever after.

The solution is going to come from systematic and society-wide changes, along with individual efforts to reclaim our attention.

But it starts with realizing that we have a problem. There's this big beautiful world out there, encouraging us to build the lives we were meant to live, but many people are too busy scrolling to hear the call.

They - and maybe you, too - have to realize that social media is not free. It costs your attention - a piece of your life - and these costs matter. Our lives matter. Our real ones, not the simulacrum of life that exists on screens.

Will we ever take meaningful action to recover our focus? Will we ever stop switching back and forth between tasks, polluting our minds and bodies with chemicals, and letting social media companies control where our attention goes?

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Blame the System, Not (Necessarily) the Individual

The current attention crisis has numerous, diverse causes (Johann Hari identifies 12 of them in his book), and it's important to note that most of them don't have to do with individual failures of will.

It's not (necessarily) that we're lazy or undisciplined, and it's certainly not the case that we're completely to blame for our struggles in paying attention.

Just as Krishnamurti said that it's a dangerous error to change the system while leaving the individual unchanged, it's not totally a personal problem either. It's both.

The 12 causes that we'll explore in this breakdown work together, immediately and over time, to ruin our ability to focus, and beating yourself up for your supposed "shortcomings" probably isn't going to do you much good.

Not when your very environment has been intentionally designed to sap your attention, focus, and willpower, and when the entire system conspires against you in favor of distraction.

There are things you can do as an individual to reclaim at least part of your attention - to start taking back your own mind - but the complete reclamation of what we've lost - what has been stolen from us - will require a collective effort.

Going on a digital detox, or implementing these little tiny lifestyle changes can be helpful, but it's not "The Answer," for the same reason that wearing a gas mask a few times a week isn't the answer to global pollution. As Johann Hari rightly says:

#2: The 4 Forms of Attention

Before getting into the deeper causes of our attention crisis and why people are having more trouble than ever focusing, it's helpful to define what exactly your attention actually is.

Your attention can be broken down, Hari believes, into four distinct forms. They are:

First: Your Spotlight is what you use to perform immediate actions, such as typing a sentence, lifting weights, making yourself a cup of coffee, etc.

It involves a narrowing of your focus down to the minutest of actions, and when this form of attention is disrupted, you get derailed from your intention to perform these specific actions and tasks.

Second: Your Starlight is the focus you bring to bear on longer-term goals or projects with longer time horizons.

Writing a book, winning a fitness competition, earning a promotion - these are things that can't be checked off a "To Do" list, but rather they take shape over time.

It represents your direction, because when you feel lost, you look up at the stars and remember where you're headed. Lose this, and you don't stand a chance of accomplishing anything meaningful across time.

Third: Your Daylight is what allows you the mental space and clarity to know what your long-term goals actually are in the first place. Without it - without being able to reflect on your life in the light of day - you won't be able to clarify your direction to yourself, and you become lost in your own life.

Fourth: Our Stadium Lights are, according to Hari, our ability to see each other, hear each other, and work together to formulate and fight for collective goals.

We turn on our stadium lights and we realize that we're all in this together and that we never have to be alone again.

There are thousands, millions, billions of us, and if, as individuals, there are limits to our potential, together, there's virtually nothing we can't do.

#3: The 12 Causes of Our Fractured Attention

You could fill dozens of books with discussions and analyses of each of the 12 causes of our attention crisis that Hari identifies, but here they are, in outline form:

Cause #1 - The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering: Information is being fired at us faster and faster, and as the volume of that information increases, it becomes more and more difficult to filter it effectively.

We don't know what to pay attention to, so we try to pay attention to everything, and we're quickly overwhelmed.

Worse, we think we can "multitask," which is essentially a lie because trying to do that comes with "switching costs." We're not really doing two things at once, but switching back and forth between them, and every time we do that, we dilute our attention.

Cause #2 - The Crippling of Our Flow States: A flow state is what we experience when we're completely immersed in a pleasurable and/or sufficiently challenging activity - when our attention is totally consumed by the task at hand, and we feel "weightless," as though the work is being done of itself. It's effortless.

Flow states arrive when we're doing one single thing at a time - something that's both meaningful to us and right at the edge of our current abilities, not too hard and not too easy.

When we keep getting distracted, however, we preempt the necessary conditions for flow, and we lose the ability to perform deep, meaningful work.

Cause #3 - The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion: Several of these causes feed into each other, and perhaps nowhere is this more self-evident than in the case of our physical and mental health.

The constantly-expanding workweek and the proliferation of demands on our attention and focus are directly contributing to overwhelm, and this, combined with our unhealthy diets and increased stress - not to mention the pollution hanging over our heads - all takes a toll on us.

Cause #4 - The Collapse of Sustained Reading: In 2017, the average American spent just 17 minutes a day reading, while spending a troubling 5.4 hours on their phones.

Many of us are reading less than we used to, and less often purely for pleasure, and this works to undermine our ability to pay attention as well. Reading trains our attention, and when we spend hours with a great book, we're also learning how to focus on one thing for extended periods of time.

In contrast, social media trains us to be superficial in our reading habits, and to flit back and forth between insubstantial and inconsequential material until we've done it so often and for so long that we don't know how to read anything longer than a status update anymore.

Cause #5 - The Disruption of Mind-Wandering: Far from being a sign of laziness or lack of discipline, mind-wandering is essential to creativity, and for allowing us the space with which to make sense of our own lives.

However, when we reflexively fill every spare moment with stimuli - constantly distracting ourselves from the possibility of ever spending one, unstimulated moment alone with ourselves - these crucial periods of free thinking start to disappear.

Cause #6 - The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You: Also referred to as "surveillance capitalism," Hari found that the modern social media landscape is intentionally and specifically designed to pull you away from your own life.

These social media companies make money every time they show you an advertisement, and to be able to show you more advertising, they need to keep you on the apps for longer. They lose money whenever you put your phone down.

You may have exceptional self-control, but is it really strong enough to withstand the greatest psychological manipulators and tech engineers in the entire world?

The tech companies are betting that it isn't, and the massive ad revenues these companies pull in are evidence that they're right.

Cause #7 - The Rise of Cruel Optimism: I had never heard this term before reading Stolen Focus, but now, I can't unsee it. Cruel optimism is basically when you take a really big problem, one with various, deeper causes in our culture, and then you offer people simplistic, individual solutions that barely make a difference in addressing the real problem.

Where it relates to attention is that we're told that we can just disable our notifications, put on noise-canceling headphones, etc., and our attention problem will be solved.

In reality, there are vast, systemic causes contributing to our collective failure of attention, and these piecemeal, personal "solutions" are not the whole answer. To pretend that they are is just cruel optimism.

Cause #8- The Surge in Stress: Stress is expensive, and it costs us the resource of our attention. The majority of doctor's visits today have their origins in stress- and anxiety-related causes, and this isn't surprising in the least, given what unchecked stress levels can do to our immune systems.

Where it concerns our attention, stressful situations - stressful lives - cause us to be hypervigilant, always on the lookout for new threats.

The pace of the modern world being what it is, with all these stressors piling up on us at once, is causing us to revert to these hypervigilant states, and it's ruining our ability to pay attention.

Cause #9 - Our Deteriorating Diets: The foods that most of us are consuming are literally poisonous to the only bodies we will ever have.

See, many of these causes work together, because taking care of yourself in a high-stress environment usually takes a back seat to simply staying alive.

If information is coming at you faster and faster, and your responsibilities are looming large in front of you, with your focus already weakened by addictive apps and games, you're not going to have the energy to cook a decent meal at home.

So, you take shortcuts with your health and choose the cheaper, faster, deadlier option. But even this is harming your ability to focus, because of all the sugar and caffeine that's in everything.

Not only are you consuming this garbage as fuel for your body, but it's taking its toll on your mind, too, in the form of sugar crashes and caffeine withdrawal.

Cause #10 - Rising Pollution: The tenth cause that Hari identifies is one that we don't normally associate with the attention crisis, but it's perhaps the most widespread problem that he deals with in the book.

We're destroying the only planet we've ever been blessed to call home and the air that we breathe is literally turning on us, crippling our brains' ability to focus.

Cause #11 - The Rise of ADHD: This is the chapter that Hari found most difficult to write, and he goes into it more deeply in Key Idea #7. There are a number of competing views on the ADHD epidemic, with world-class experts disagreeing with each other on even basic facets of the problem, such as its underlying causes.

Cause #12 - The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically: The basis of our ability to pay attention is formed in childhood, and this is the final cause that Hari identifies for attention problems in later life.

We're overprotecting and overdirecting our children (full disclosure: I write this as someone without kids of my own, so please, come to your own conclusions), and as a result, they're not developing in a way that's conducive to being able to focus as an adult.

We've already mapped the territory, writes Hari, and we're basically telling children that it's no longer safe to explore, make mistakes, ask questions, and face danger - that it's no longer safe to be a child.

The "cult of safetyism" is depriving children of key developmental opportunities that will allow them to pursue what interests them, and forge their own identity.

We tell them what to study, when and for how long, and whom they're allowed to study with, and remove any and all possibility of ever getting hurt in any way.

Then, once they become adults, they have to face the adult world lacking these crucial skills.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

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#1: Sleep!! Now!!

Most of your problems can probably be solved with a good night's sleep. Cruel optimism? Hardly! Maybe "solved" isn't exactly the right word, but with proper rest, you'll at least have the energy and mental clarity to address the challenges that confront you.

This is so critically, foundationally important, and it's a step that's so easy to skip. Especially for new parents, people who are providing for one or more family members, high-achievers fighting to get ahead, etc.

But again, it's just one of the most important things you could ever do for yourself, and your attention will thank you if you make getting enough sleep the priority that it deserves to be. The fight for your attention begins in the bedroom.

#2: Practice Single-Tasking

Multitasking is for computers, not people. The human brain literally cannot multitask, and everyone - including you - works best when they devote 100% of their energy toward one single thing. Call it "single-tasking."

You could also call it flow, which is essentially what it is. Pick something that's personally meaningful to you, preferably something that's just on the edge of your current abilities, and devote all your energies in this moment to performing that one action, or working on that one thing.

This even works for things you "have to" do. Your energies are hopelessly diluted if you try to do too much at once.

Walking while listening to an audiobook is fine, but if two things take brainpower and cognitive space in order to focus on them, then they deserve your full focus, separately.

#3: Join a Group for Collective Action

The first two Action Steps are individual solutions, and they're steps worth taking. But, as is stressed repeatedly in this book, individual solutions won't solve collective problems.

For that, we have to band together, and in the back of the book, Johann Hari provides some links to groups working to take on our attention crisis.

There are plenty of places to start, but take a look at the following organizations and see if their work interests you:

On Fighting to Change How the Internet Works: Humane-Tech.com

On Fighting for a Four-Day Week: 4-Day-Week.com

On Children Being Allowed to Play: Let-Grow.org

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Johann Hari is the author of three New York Times best-selling books and the Executive Producer of an Oscar-nominated movie and an eight-part TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson. His books have been translated into 38 languages and been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah to Noam Chomsky, and from Elton John to Naomi Klein.

Johann’s TED talks have been viewed more than 80 million times. The first is named ‘Everything You Think You Know About Addiction is Wrong'. The second is entitled ‘This Could Be Why You Are Depressed or Anxious'.

He has written over the past decade for some of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Spectator, Le Monde Diplomatique, the Sydney Morning Herald, and Politico. He has appeared on NPR’s All Thing Considered, HBO’s Realtime With Bill Maher, The Joe Rogan Podcast, the BBC’s Question Time, and many other popular shows.

Johann was twice named ‘National Newspaper Journalist of the Year’ by Amnesty International. He has also been named ‘Cultural Commentator of the Year’ and ‘Environmental Commentator of the Year’ at the Comment Awards.

He lives half the year in London and spends the other half of the year traveling to research his books. To read about what Johann is working on now, and what you can do to support him, please click here.

Additional Resources:

Stolen-Focus-Book.com | Main Website

Audio Interviews with Experts from Stolen Focus

Additional Endnotes from Stolen Focus

The Social Dilemma | Netflix Movie Trailer

"The Conscience of Silicon Valley" Tristan Harris w/ Joe Rogan

How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day

This Book on Amazon:

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari

If You Liked This Book:

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari

Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope, by Johann Hari

Essentialism, by Greg McKeown

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Silence: In the Age of Noise, by Erling Kagge

Ten Arguments for deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality, by Anthony de Mello

Stillness is the Key, by Ryan Holiday

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OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free (for now!), and you can find it right here.

What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out most of the Book Notes, all the Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc.

So there’s a lot more for you left to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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